Sanjay Gangal, CEO and president of AECCafe recently conducted an interview with Hans-Martin Zogg, Business Director of Total Stations at Leica Geosystems, which is part of Hexagon. Zogg spoke about the new Leica AP20 AutoPole which is product solution designed to increase the productivity of Leica Total Station users, and boost speed, accuracy and safety on the jobsite.
Sanjay: Tell us about the Leica AP20 AutoPole.
Han-Martin: The Leica AP20 AutoPole is an absolutely unique solution, which we have just announced. The AP20 is an enhancement to the productivity of our Total Station users, and is easy to use. When we develop product solutions at Leica Geosystems, we always want to address actual customer challenges. And with the AP20, we actually address three main customer challenges, which occur when customers are using Total Stations in the Total Station workflow. The first challenge is, when you measure the Total Stations, actually you need to hold the prism pole always vertical. So this slows up the measurement process.
This is something found with every level, is that need to level up the level bubble that brings the bubble into the center so that the pole is exactly vertical and then the user can measure its speed. But it’s also limiting the measurement area, because you always set up the pole or a point which you want to measure and if you have an obstruct level you cannot measure the point. Thus the verticality of the pole is a big challenge today. The second challenge which we are going to address with our AP20 AutoPole is actually the automatic pole height reading, respectively when you measure the pole height, you always need to enter it manually into the field software. And that’s very error prone and can cause cumbersome and time consuming pole processing. If you can actually fix it in the pole processing, you might be even lucky. Quite often, you need to go again into the field and redo your measurements.
